An enriched innovation ecosystem enables systematic innovation management.
Innovation is about figuring out alternative ways to do things for achieving business value. Nowadays, with the speed of changes in the digital era, innovation is no longer a “nice to have,” but a “must-have” factor in business success.
The environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. In the organizational setting, innovation is the means to the end, it should either benefit your customers or your employees.
Innovation & belief: The strong belief in yourself and being innovative is a state of mind which can be developed via continuous learning and practices. With belief, you have the grit mindset which is a critical trait as an innovator. An innovative mind holding strong belief has the raw endurance and perseverance that keep you motivated despite the very obstacles, with single-mindedness to stay focused and resilience to fail forward.
While most beliefs are learned and ingrained in our minds at a very young age. Unfortunately, some of the learned beliefs are perhaps outdated, limit our mind, and lock our creativity. Thus, it’s crucial to keep learning agile, updating common beliefs. The right set of beliefs drive positive attitudes to experiment with alternative ways to do things and inspire creative thinking and innovation. However, some outdated beliefs can mislead people to think extremely, stimulate negative emotions, and stifle innovation.
Innovation & steady: You need to make sure that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in your innovation pipeline, and, therefore, you need a methodological platform to facilitate idea generation and streamline idea flow and management. Innovation is a sort of energy flow with different steady states. Steady state is always a temporary situation because complexity has many moving parts. Just as we find energy is released from one steady state to another, we find innovation from our outer realities attempts to change to the steady state of our inner self. This energy is called innovation.
A steadfast information-savvy problem-solving continuum means doing more with innovation, becoming information savvy is like a hiking journey, for gaining new and wider views, discovering unusual dots and building unexpected connections between starting points and its rich environment, the digital ecosystem, to spark innovation continually. Equilibrium is the key to improve innovation management maturity. As information flow directly impacts idea flow and business flow; it creates forces to keep or maintain equilibrium as perceived steady state; it also has tipping points to form new equilibriums by transforming to new steady states. And this is an ongoing process to improve idea flow and innovation maturity.
Innovation & landscaping: If creativity is the seeds you need to plant in, culture is the soil, innovation management is like gardening by leveraging architecture activities as landscaping. There are different types of innovations such as breakthrough innovation or incremental innovation; hard innovation or soft innovation. You have to look into an unknown future and attempt to define the landscape with its opportunities and risks for developing a highly competitive real-time innovative organization. Metaphorically, innovative organizations are like flower gardens, in which each type of innovation is a different type of plant growing in the garden. You can retard some plants and encourage others by selective nurturing; or sow, plant completely new plants for boosting creative energy or improving innovation effectiveness.
Innovation is not serendipity. Architecting an innovation landscape is a structural design process which can bring greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business processes, people dynamics, resource alignment, cultural quintessential, or technological touches. Setting the right principles is also important; without standards, innovation can go in many directions, often redundant, sometimes canceling each other, cost too much. The set of standards or guidelines are based on solid governance principles, like landscaping, and can ensure innovation garden blossoms with four seasons of changes.
Organizations are at the different vertical sectors and stages of business maturity. It takes a creative mindset to connect wider dots, open leadership to build innovative culture, and interdisciplinary methodologies to manage innovation effectively. An enriched innovation ecosystem enables systematic innovation management. Organizational management should tailor their business needs, take a logical approach to build their organizational innovation strength systematically for achieving the long-term business results in a consistent way.
